INGEN Ø ER EN Ø (No Island is an Island)

‘Igen Ø er en Ø’, or ‘No Island is an Island’ is a rehashing of the common phrase and title of English poet John Donne’s poem: ‘No Man is an Island’. It was made in collaboration with the Larp (Live Action Role Play) designer Nina Runa Essendrop who created a roleplay to take people on a visitation of a fictional archipelago of islands. The participants then created a soundscape using their voices. The recordings of these sessions were then used as material for a spoken word performance.

The piece implies that the audience are to make the difficult choice, as passengers on a sinking ship, of which island to swim towards in the nearby archipelago whilst also knowing full well that all the islands hold promising but very different possibilities. This is conundrum is partially borrowed from the metaphor used by Jean-François Lyotard in a definition of Post-modernism and further interpreted by Metamodernism as sinking ship.